The present invention relates to the general field of aviation turbine engines, and in particular to the thrust reversers of airplane turboprops or turbojets. It relates more particularly to a method of controlling a thrust reverser.
Numerous airplanes fitted with such engines are grounded because of faults due to an error message issued in the cockpit of the airplane, and in particular a “RevFault” error message that informs the pilot of a problem on a thrust reverser, with the consequence of significantly limiting the availability of airplanes.
Such an error message corresponds in reality to more than a dozen individual fault messages relating to the thrust reverser, and it suffices that any one of these individual fault messages is present for the sole error message to be activated. However, most of the individual fault messages can be followed by a piece of equipment ending up correctly deployed/stowed/moved. Nevertheless, no distinction is drawn between a piece of equipment that is slow and a piece of equipment that is indeed blocked, such that if at the end of a length of time T the piece of equipment under consideration has still not reached the expected position, then the individual fault message that has been generated will activate the error message in the cockpit and will remain engaged until the airplane engine is switched off, thereby preventing the thrust reverser being deployed if the message appears before the deployment command or merely preventing reverse thrust being applied even if the thrust reverser nevertheless ends up by deploying and could thus have been used to continue or undertake its mission.